I mentioned to Claude one (1) time that I've been struggling with anxiety lately and now every time I try to do anything with it, it tells me to go touch grass and take a nap.
Me: "Please help me debug this code."
Claude: "Is this really what your nervous system needs right now?"
If only there was some *extremely recent* event where we saw what happens when you put a bunch of people on a boat with a communicable disease.
But alas, nothing even remotely like that happened in the last, say, six years so we just don't know...
If only there was some *extremely recent* event where we could have seen what happens when you put a bunch of people on a boat with a communicable disease.
But alas, nothing even remotely like that happened in the last, say, six years so we just don't know...
It's fascinating how video game and action movie aesthetics have completely cordycepted the right-wing brain. Totally disconnected from any historical or material reality.
We know that after Occupy Wall Street, billionaires poured money into diverting populist rage into racially-charged, anti-tax, reactionary movements that posed no threat to capital.
I'm pretty sure the same thing happened on the Left, explaining the shift towards class-blind identity politics.
What this means is that if you can cobble together even the most barely coherent pitch, you could be swimming in venture capital within the hour.
How does "AI-powered psychedelic therapist that stores your drug-out ramblings on a blockchain for targeted ads" sound? This round I want $10 million.
I feel like AI has pretty much been personally purely beneficial? Its good for coding, a great natural language interface for Google Scholar, and since I do everything on Linux, it hasn't impacted my computer-using experience at all.
If you still use Windows, I feel like that's on you...
Amazing how the sun and the clouds so reliably coordinate to make viewing in New England impossible
I mostly hated it, but there was something kind of nice about those first, 2-ish months when it felt like there was still a lot of solidarity. I remember crossing the street to avoid people on runs and we'd make eye contact - a moment of "isn't it crazy we're living through this?"
I feel like this is part of a broader cultural tend towards an exclusive focus on "critique" - we're developing infinite ways to articulate how things can be bad and/or getting worse, but very little to balance it out and recognize that good things are good.
A weird feature of the current relationship landscape is that we've developed elaborate vocabularies for pathologizing partners (avoidant, narcissist, love-bombing, etc) while the vocabulary for describing what a good relationship actually feels like has gotten noticeably thinner?
I think the key thing here is "live in constant fear." None of the economic numbers captures what (imo) is the real driver of the vibecession: our collective mental health is in the toilet, and those feelings of lack of safety get reflected in things like the CCI.
Don't you know that empiricism is just another Way of Knowing (and a colonial-capitalist one at that) which has no epistemic privilege over *my* preferred Way of Knowing: the vibes I get from doomscrolling algorithm-driven social media feeds?!
Heckin problematic, Will.
s/
It's fascinating that people think the graphs are primarily rhetorical devices vs. representations of the world.
Reflections on the closing of Hampshire College, almost ten years to the day from when I graduated.
Since then, the world has been buffeted by crises, catastrophes, and an ever-accelerating rate of change. What have we lost with this closure?
synergies.substack.com/p/a-place-i-...
I'm coming around to the idea that we're actually fictional characters in a novel and the author is a *terrible writer.*
If you saw this on an HBO show, you'd turn it off.
I feel like all the technical enonomics analyses should come after acknowledging what is to my mind the obvious answer: we were all traumatized by living through the worst natural disaster in a century.
That seems like it'd kill anyone's vibes
One thing that’s interesting about vibecession discourse is that if you point out the basic mismatch exists you will inevitably get dozens of leftists flooding in to call you the dumbest SOB alive for not seeing the obvious explanation…
and then all offering completely different explanations.
JD Vance converting to Catholicism and then immediately re-inventing Protestantism is a fascinating window into the American mind.
I don't have this data on me, but I'd bet that change in consumer sentiment tracks recent declines in mental health as well.
Coming back to COVID, our cultural response was almost tailor-made to breed pathology. We never processed what we'd been through in any meaningful way and social media algorithms + demagogues leaned hard into fomenting paranoia and distrust - fragmenting social supports that would have helped.
Even if people aren't precarious in absolute monetary terms, we *feel* precarious because we're being constantly battered by existential stressors. COVID killed/disabled millions, then the richest men on Earth started talking about taking all our jobs, and the government is imploding.
Because untreated PTSD often gets worse over time - and COVID is only the most major shock of the last five years. Accelerating AI, political/government chaos of the last 1.5 years; all of these are unexpected changes that make it hard for people to recover a sense of safety.
Because the country just lived through a deeply traumatic natural disaster that killed millions and left us all struggling with both unmanaged post-traumatic stress and a deep loss of any sense of safety?
This is not an economics problem, it's a psychological one.
Tbh I think that could have saved the school.
I sometimes fantasized about a future where Hampshire tried to re-brand as a more STEM-focused school (with the same progressive orientation).
It never would have flown with students or alumni, but imagine what they could have done if they poured money into cutting-edge lab facilities.
First New College, then Hampshire College. We're coming to the end of the attempt to make higher education something other than hackwork, slavish devotion to job training for working and middle class, pre-wealth studies for the "elite." How fucking dull are these times of ours.
I don’t remember who said it but I still think the fact that “I sat alone in my apartment for months listening to ambulance sirens and now I’m sad all the time” isn’t a response people can give to pollsters is underrated as an explanation for reported attitudes about the economy
